Philosophy of Microbiology: An introduction to philosophy of microbiology
This book will set out some central philosophical issues in microbiology, along with suggestions for how microbiological insight contributes to and even transforms philosophy of biology.
Abstract
Microbes are the most important, diverse and ancient life forms on our planet. The science of these organisms, microbiology, is the science of the most significant living entities and their influence on all the rest of life. Many philosophers will need to be persuaded of these claims, and this book will try to do that. Every scientific field has philosophical aspects, from how the objects of study are conceptualized to the ways in which those objects are known, but microbiology’s philosophical issues have only just begun to attract sustained attention from philosophers of biology. These philosophical aspects have driven many debates in microbiological research itself. This book will set out some central philosophical issues in microbiology, along with suggestions for how microbiological insight contributes to and even transforms philosophy of biology. I will start by making a case for philosophy of microbiology based on a general appreciation of the microbial world and its significance for all life. If the world we inhabit is indeed a microbial world, then many of the standard philosophical ways in which we conceive biological phenomena and how they are investigated will have to be rethought. Each of the following chapters deals with a particular aspect of that rethinking. This general project has a number of complications. One of them is that common terms for microscopic life forms are colloquial and contestable. ‘Microbe’, for instance, is a broad and convenient term that is used to cover a range of microscopic life (see Table I.1). It encompasses all